Wanda Corn’s scholarship, as well as her teaching, has focused on art and artists of the American Gilded Age, early twentieth-century avant-garde modernist culture along the Atlantic rim, and American artists commonly identified as regionalists. She named and defined the American Tonalist movement and has renewed interest in forgotten artists such as Grant Wood and the women artists who produced murals for the 1893 World’s Fair. Working across the boundaries of the academy and the museum, her books have accompanied and initiated major exhibitions. In her curatorial practices, she was an early adopter of extended wall labels and contextualizing ephemera and material culture. Her travelling exhibition on Georgia O’Keeffe, supported by a Mellon Emeritus grant, pioneered in showcasing not only works of art but examples of clothing drawn from the artist’s distinctive wardrobe and photographs demonstrating her singular style of modeling for the camera. Corn’s research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Stanford Humanities Center, the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, The Center for Advanced Study at the National Gallery in Washington, DC, the Clark Art Institute, and the Georgia O’Keeffe Research Center.
Arriving on campus in 1980, Wanda Corn held the university's first permanent appointment in the history of American art and served terms as chair of the Department of Art and Art History and Acting Director of the Stanford Museum. From 1992 to 1995 she was the Anthony P. Meier Family Professor and Director of the Stanford Humanities Center and from 2000 until retiring in 2008, the Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor in Art History. In 2002 Stanford’s Phi Beta Kappa Society gave her its Undergraduate Teaching Award and in 2005, she received the University’s Graduate Service Recognition Award. In 2006, the Archives of American Art awarded her The Lawrence A. Fleischman Award for Scholarly Excellence in the Field of American Art History; in 2007 she received a Lifetime Achievement Award in the Visual Arts from the Women's Caucus for Art and a Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award from the College Art Association (CAA). In 2014, CAA dedicated a Distinguished Scholar session to her work. In 2003, Corn served as the Clark Distinguished Visiting Professor at Williams College and in 2009, as the John Rewald Distinguished Visiting Lecturer at the CUNY Graduate Center. She has been a member of the Advisory Board of the Georgia O’Keeffe Catalogue Raisonné, the Board of the Terra Foundation in American Art, the Board of Directors of the College Art Association, and the Commission for the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She currently serves as a trustee of the Andrew and Betsy Wyeth Foundation for American Art, and as an advisor to the Grant Wood Art Colony at the University of Iowa. Since 2000, she has chaired the Advisory Committee for Historic Artist Homes and Studios (HAHS) an affiliate program of the National Trust. Retired from teaching, she lives, writes, and gardens today on Cape Cod in Massachusetts and continues to lead Travel-Study trips for Stanford’s Alumni Association.
In 2018, a Public Scholars grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities launched the writing of The Couple with the Pitchfork: American Gothic from Easel to Icon. The culmination of five decades of research and collecting of American Gothic ephemera, this book explores how and why Grant Wood’s couple has become one of the most recognized and reworked twosomes in all of image history.
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